Contributing to the Open Source Community for the first time

Syed Jahangir — Wed, 20 May 2020 06:46:09 +0000

My Favorite Project

I would like to speak about my favorite project during which is also my first contribution to open source community I worked on during my last year of Computer Science B.Tech degree. I was searching for internships to gain industrial exposure. Fortunately, I was going through my timeline on Linkedin and came across the open-source projects post. Open source was in my mind for a very long time. But I’ve never contributed to it. I found out that the platform is to welcome new open source developers. I was highly exuberant and applied for it immediately.
I contributed for at least a 3-month for the open-source project. The project I worked on is developing an Android App called Travel Mate.

Travel Mate is an android app for travelers. It provides features like choosing the correct destination, making bookings, and organizing the trip. It provides solutions for every problem a traveler might face during their journey. It provides a comprehensive list of information about a destination: current weather, best places to hang out, and the city's current trends.

Demo Link

You try your hands on by downloading it from google play store here.

Link to Code

project-travel-mate / Travel-Mate

A complete travel guide!

Travel Mate

Travel Mate is an android app for travellers. It provides features like choosing the correct destination, making bookings, and organizing the trip. It provides solutions for every problem a traveller might face during their journey. It provides a comprehensive list of information about a destination: current weather, best places to hangout, and city's current trends. Checkout Features list for a detailed feature description.

Download

Support Us

We are not running any ads in the app and the source code is available for free on GitHub. It costs us to keep the servers up all the time. Support us to make sure we continue to help travellers.

Quick Links

Journey of a hackathon project to a Summer of Code Project
Features
- Destinations
- My Trips
- Travel
- Utility
Contributing
Join Travel Mate Beta Testing

Features

Destinations

Travel Mate helps decide the destination by providing tourist spots, interesting…

View on GitHub

How I built it (what's the stack? did I run into issues or discover something new along the way?)

The stack I worked on was completely Java and the project uses some of the open-source libraries to support its functionalities and improve performance. It was initially difficult getting used to the environment (Fixing the merge conflicts 😜) as I was not very familiar with git and all the projects were on GitHub, but with the support of the mentors, it became a piece of cake.
I was so excited to submit the first PR in GitHub. This went on for 2 months. I was highly motivated by my fellow contributors as they were equally competing with me. Their enthusiasm triggered me to participate and contribute more to Open Source. Thanks to the mentors who were very helpful.

Additional Thoughts / Feelings / Stories

It was great to still be the top contributor to the Project Travel Mate right after the organization owners.
Below are some of the points I got in return by contributing to open source:

Excellent experience of working on a real-world project.
Learned how things are done professionally.
Being an Open Source contributor to some of the coolest projects on GitHub.
Chance to get mentored by some of the best software developers from tech giants. I was mentored by Adobe and Amazon developers.

Here is the link for my contributions to the open-source project.

I would like to thank Github for providing such an awesome platform to contribute to open-source.

Forem: Syed Jahangir